CISO Forum 2022: the first major Russian security conference in the New Reality

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Hello everyone! After a two-year break, I took part in Moscow CISO Forum 2022 with a small talk “Malicious open source: the cost of using someone else’s code”.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239084

CISO Forum is the first major Russian conference since the beginning of The New Reality of Information Security (TNRoIS). My presentation was just on this topic. How malicious commits in open source projects change development and operations processes. I will make a separate video about this (upd. added Malicious Open Source: the cost of using someone else’s code). In this episode, I would like to tell you a little about the conference itself.

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Gitlab OmniAuth Static Passwords and stored XSS

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Hello everyone! In this episode, let’s take a look at the latest vulnerabilities in Gitlab. On March 31, the Critical Security Release for GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) was released. GitLab recommends that all installations running a version affected by the issues described in the bulletin are upgraded to the latest version as soon as possible.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239079

Unfortunately, Gitlab, as well as some other Western companies, is currently hostile to the country where I live and work. So their calls to immediately install updates now have additional connotations. If Gitlab is so clearly politically motivated that even the logo on their site has been recolored in a certain way, then what else can be expected from their updates? Backdoors? Malicious functionality that wipes data? Quite possible. IMHO, when companies are so willing to mix geopolitical messages and business, it exposes them as unreliable vendors that should be avoided.

But let’s get back to vulnerabilities. There are 17 CVEs in the bulletin. We will start with the most critical one.

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Spring4Shell, Spring Cloud Function RCE and Spring Cloud Gateway Code Injection

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about last week’s high-profile vulnerabilities in Spring. Let’s figure out what happened.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239078

Of course, it’s amazing how fragmented the software development world has become. Now there are so many technologies, programming languages, libraries and frameworks! It becomes very difficult to keep them all in sight. Especially if it’s not the stack you use every day. Entropy keeps growing every year. Programmers are relying more and more on off-the-shelf libraries and frameworks, even where it may not be fully justified. And vulnerabilities in these off-the-shelf components lead to huge problems. So it was in the case of a very critical Log4Shell vulnerability, so it may be in the case of Spring vulnerabilities.

Spring is a set of products that are used for Java development. They are developed and maintained by VMware. The main one is Spring Framework. But there are a lot of them, at least 21 on the website. And because Spring belongs to VMware, you can find a description of the vulnerabilities on the VMware Tanzu website. VMware Tanzu is a suite of products that helps users run and manage multiple Kubernetes (K8S) clusters across public and private “clouds”. Spring is apparently also part of this suite and therefore Spring vulnerabilities are published there. Let’s look at the 3 most serious vulnerabilities published in the last month.

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How to remove sensitive information from a Github repository

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Hello everyone! In this episode, I would like to talk about Github and how to remove sensitive information that was accidentally uploaded there.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239077

This is a fairly common problem. When publishing the project code on Github, developers forget to remove credentials: logins, passwords, tokens. What to do if this becomes known? Well, of course, these credentials must be urgently changed.

What was publicly available on the Internet cannot be completely removed. This data is indexed and copied by some systems. But wiping it from github.com is real.

Why is it not enough to just delete the file in the Github repository? The problem is that the history of changes for the file will remain and everything will be visible there. Surprisingly, there is still no tool in the Github web interface to remove the history for a file. You have to use third-party utilities, one of them is git-filter-repo.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2022

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Hello everyone! I am glad to greet you from the most sanctioned country in the world. Despite all the difficulties, we carry on. I even have some time to release new episodes. This time it will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2022.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239076

I do the analysis as usual with my open source tool Vulristics. You can still download it on github. I hope that github won’t block Russian repositories and accounts, but for now it looks possible. Most likely, I will just start hosting the sources of my projects on avleonov.com in this case. Or on another domain, if it gets even tougher. Stay tuned.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday February 2022

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2022. I release it pretty late, because of the my previous big episode about the blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners. Please take a look if you haven’t seen it. Well, if you are even slightly interested in the world news, you can imagine that the end of February 2022 in Eastern Europe is not the best time to create new content on Vulnerability Management. Let’s hope that peace and tranquility will be restored soon. And also that geopolitical confrontation between the largest nuclear powers will de-escalate somehow.

But let’s get back to information security. While working on Microsoft Patch Tuesday report for February 2022, I made a lot of improvements to my open source project for vulnerability prioritization Vulristics. I want to start with them.

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VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners

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Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf22 Vulnerability Management conference. I want to talk about the blind spots in the knowledge bases of Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management products.

This report was presented in Russian at Tenable Security Day 2022. The video is here.

Potential customers rarely worry about the completeness of the Knowledge Base when choosing a Vulnerability Scanner. They usually trust the VM vendors’ claims of the “largest vulnerability base” and the total number of detection plugins. But in fact the completeness is very important. All high-level vulnerability prioritization features are meaningless unless the vulnerability has been reliably detected. In this presentation, I will show the examples of blindspots in the knowledge bases of vulnerability management products, try to describe the causes and what we (as customers and the community) can do about it.

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